The turbine head itself was the final passenger for the mini JCB used to move these heavy components.

The next step was to set up the "A" frame and then start to assemble the tower horizontally across the ground. The turbine head was then placed on the tower and greased and final tweaks performed. At this point we had a slight calamity, as it was found that something was stuck inside the generator jamming the mechanism. The man from Proven then spent the best part of 4 hours teasing what appeared to be an errant nut out with a piece of wire. It was concluded that this was accidentally left in there from the manufacturing process. I am only glad that we found this problem with the turbine on the ground rather than it jamming in operation!

The turbine was then hoisted into position the power lines were connected and the bolts fully tightened with a giant spanner.

The wind that day was reasonable so the turbine could then be immediately commissioned. The wind has to be fast enough to get the turbine moving to the point it produces 260v.

The Windy Boy 6000 inverter from SMA is programmed with a special laptop computer with many variables that define when it should start and stop production. The nature of the output etc.

Since the turbine has been up it has been in active production mode for over 200 hours and has produced over 80kwhrs of electricity. The highest day level so far is about 24 kwhs in 24 hours. July and August are not windy months and I was expecting almost nothing to be produced in the summer.

Observations
The wind turbine turns almost all of the time but the winds have to be quite strong for it to start producing and then it only produces a small amount of electricity. As the wind speed increases the output increases disproportionately. For example a 12mph wind produces a theoretical output of 1000watts, but a 15mph wind is closer to 2400 watts. At 20mph wind produces nearly 5000watts.

Noise
Before the installation noise was my main concern, I had studied the data and knew that the output was similar to the background noise of the environment. It is clearly audible but not noisy in comparison with the environment. In fact they are most noisy just before they start producing electricity, as they have no load on them till the inverter kicks in and slows them down.

To see the Turbine in action click here

http://www.renew-reuse-recycle.com/WindTurbinefull_compressed.wmv